Nite Songs

  Scary to think that Helen Love are now approaching 30 years together as a band. There was a time for about five minutes in 1997 or so when they were briefly threatening to be the next "big thing" with both John Peel and Steve Lamacq championing their singles only to torpedo their career in fine self-sabotaging style with the scathing anti-Britpop single Long Live The UK Music Scene . Not that it stopped them - they simply continued merrily on their way on the minors with a series of albums with This Is My World  being no less than either their fifth or eighth (depending on whether you're counting their three EP compilations). And it finds the band in, if not a more grown-up (let's be honest, if they did that it'd arguably spoil everything that makes them such a great band) then certainly a more reflective mood with Helen, Sheena and Ricardo looking back at a life lived as an indie circuit band in Swansea. And I'm gonna come straight to the point here, they...

  "Your evil sun is rising up and he's shakin'/Shakin' for you..."   Birdland - Shoot You Down We're taking a quick break away from the whole biker sleaze rock this week to wander into more English territory. Don't worry, we'll be back there next week - blame the random playlist on my Itunes for this diversion as earlier in the week during a quiet afternoon at work, it cued up a song I'd not heard for a few years, namely Birdland's classic Hollow Heart  and it made me think "Feck, now if EVER there was a band who deserved a Garbage Days Revisited entry..." I do actually vaguely remember Birdland from way way back in the day just when I was starting to get into guitar music as a 12-year-old - they had a minor Top 40 hit with Sleep With Me  (it got featured on the Top 40 breakers on TOTP but a full appearance was not forthcoming) then seemed to disappear from view very quickly afterwards. The group had appeared on the scene in a blizzar...

  "I get the feeling someone's fucking with me/They're trying to drain me of my dignity"  - Baby Chaos  - Ignoramus Hands up, I probably should have done this column a lot sooner than I did. I was actually considering writing an SFTJ on Baby Chaos some time around the very early days of the column around the time I covered Kerbdog , the Almighty and part 1 of the ongoing Wildhearts retrospective but because they had an album out around this time (the excellent Ape Confronts Cosmos ) it kind of fell through the cracks. However, as we're now approaching the time where the group resurfaced under a different name (similar to how Kerbdog did with Wilt), it seemed a good time to finally cover them. Similar to Kerbdog, Baby Chaos were a band I encountered a LOT as a support group in my early days of going to gigs - they were on same label as the Wildhearts, EastWest (and predictably got absolutely stiffed by said label the same as the 'Hearts and Voice of the Beehi...

  Another January release from Rum Bar, we first encountered the Cheap Cassettes last year via their mini-album See Her In Action  which was a pleasant slice of power-pop which owed a sly nod to both the Replacements and the Jam. It's safe to say that this full length album is pretty much a full continuation of that sound. Similar to the EP, the sound that Ever Since Ever Since  brings to mind is a poppier Replacements especially the Paul Westerberg style vocals although there's a definite nod to early '80s US power poppers the Plimsouls in here as well as evidenced on the punchy riffs and chorus hooks of tunes like  Malnutrition and How I Got What I Wanted . To be honest, this album blows hot and cold a bit although there's definitely more good than bad on here. The plus points - Your I's Are Too Close Together  is a fine slice of early Elvis Costello style vitriol, There Goes That Girl  owes a sly nod to Soul Asylum in one of their better moments, One Bla...

  Matt Millership aka Tensheds is someone who's proved over the past decade or so to be one of the UK music scene's great unsung talents, most recently with his excellent lockdown album, 2020's The Days Of My Confinement . An Intimate Portrait of Crazy Beautiful  is actually a re-recording of his second album ( Crazy Beautiful ) with the songs being presented in a more stripped down form. As someone who actually got into Millership's music through Crazy Beautiful 's follow-up The Dandy Punk Prince , this had the potential to be an interesting trip down memory lane. The two main touchstones that spring to mind listening to these songs in this form are Tom Waits' ragged barfly laments and the stripped down feel of Nick Cave's excellent The Boatman's Call . Millership, accompanied by just his piano, takes the listener on a nocturnal journey through the streets of late noughties London on the likes of Go Out On The Weekend , Angel Of London  and Sentimental ...

  "Calling all children of electric ages! Calling all the gods, all the fools, all the sages!"  - Circus of Power - Call Of The Wild We seem to have taken a turn down a lesser marked highway marked "biker sleaze" for these last few GDR's ( Zodiac Mindwarp , the Four Horsemen , Junkyard etc) but no apologies, this is to my mind an area of the late '80s rock scene that's ripe for re-evaluation. Circus of Power were another such band but there's a bit of a difference here - while the Four Horsemen and Junkyard were very much L.A. bands (in terms of where they had their success even if neither actually came from there originally), Circus of Power were their East Coast equivalent, hailing from New York. Possibly because of having grown up in the biker bars in the Big Apple rather than the ones on the desert highways of the south, there was definitely a bit of a leaner and meaner edge to Circus of Power's sound - they were more Electric  era Cult than...

  "Since when did Motley Crue become classic rock?/And when did Ozzy become an actor?"  - Bowling For Soup  - 1985 Similar to Lit a few weeks ago, I should by all rights have hated Bowling For Soup. I've mentioned in this column before how frat-punk, along with nu-metal, was pretty much the bane of my musical life in my early twenties. I mean, don't get me wrong, my 15-year-old self loved the Offspring's Smash  and Green Day's Dookie , Insomniac  and Kerplunk  but by the time I hit my third year at Uni, the formula was wearing very very thin. Both of the abovementioned seemed to have been treading water with their late '90s efforts all generally feeling a bit less special than the one before and by 2001, the Offspring had well and truly bottomed out with the dismal Conspiracy of One  while Green Day's Warning  was the sound of a band without a rudder before they drifted off into ill-advised concept album territory on American Idiot  (a frust...

  Hailing from Sweden, the Drippers are another of those bands who you suspect might just have a very well-worn copy of the Dead Boys' Young, Loud And Snotty  in their record collection somewhere. Certainly, the thunderous Sonic Reducer  style guitars of opener 5 Day Blues (2 Day Boogie)  definitely has Stiv and Cheetah's fingerprints all over it. Second track Overload  ups the intensity to almost Motorhead style levels and the initial signs here are good. Sure, we've had plenty of nasty scuzzed-up rock 'n' roll reprobates peddling this music passing through the Nite Songs review pages in recent months but there's just something about the sheer unbridled ferocity of tunes like Time For Some Action  and Shine No Light  or the Hip Priests style full throttle assault of Racing Down A Dead End and Shit Island Showdown  which makes your mouth smile and your head bob along. It's the oldest trick in the book but dammit, it undoubtedly still works - I mea...

  First new offering from Volbeat since 2019's Rewind, Replay And Rebound  and for once there's a bit of expectation here. That album was an unexpected return to form after a slump which had gone on for a few albums before it so the big question here is - have they managed to keep the run going? To be honest, the answer's no. Similar to a lot of Volbeat's output over the last decade or so, Servant of the Mind  is a solid and workmanlike album, well-played and tight sounding but seriously lacking a spark to really make you want to cue it up for repeated listening. Opening track Temple of Ekur  kind of sums the problem up - it's reasonable enough with a winding Therapy?-style riff underpinning it but it just doesn't stick in your mind. And when they go into latter day Iron Maiden proggy territory on the snoresome Sacred Stones  and Lasse's Birgitta , it's difficult to resist the temptation to reach for the skip forward button. Oh sure, there's the odd ...

  "Sometimes when I feel so boxed in, I wanna go take a ride/Grab my keys and my cigarettes and disappear off into the night..."  - Junkyard  - Simple Man There seems to be a bit of a running theme through the last few Garbage Days Revisited entries, namely that they all seem to hail from the more rough and mean end of sleaze rock (biker sleaze maybe? I dunno). And trust me, we've got a few more lined up in the coming weeks. The thing is, I'll always stick up for the scuzzier end of this sort of music. Yes yes, I've heard the arguments as to why grunge had to happen and I fully understand them - I mean for feck's sake, when '80s rock has basically been reduced to the likes of Winger, Firehouse, Nelson, Danger Danger etc, I think we can agree that a hard rain kind of has to fall. But the thing is that when Nirvana essentially torched the joint and salted it some time in late '91/early '92, there were several groups who really didn't deserve to g...

  "Caught on the back step, I find myself trippin'"  - King Prawn  - Someone To Hate Ska punk is one of those genres that seems to undergo a resurrection on an almost yearly basis. Sometimes it's good when you get a group of fired up young agitators equally influenced by reggae and punk ready to unleash a vitriolic state of the world address (see the likes of Sonic Boom Six, the Skints and Millie Manders and the Shut-Up in recent years) and sometimes it's basically a bunch of fat lads in Hawaiian shirts doing comedy skanking cover versions and being less about smashing the system than flushing the cistern. And, let's be honest, the whole late '90s/early '00s era had a lot of the latter and not many of the former (names withheld but if you were there I'm sure you've got your own memories of it). Happily though, in amongst the dross we did have the odd genuinely good band and King Prawn were one such example. Similar to Pitchshifter , who we cove...

  Featuring at least one off-duty member of Nite Songs favourites the Streetwalkin' Cheetahs, this second album from US biker rock types Angus Khan had something of a protracted genesis. Originally released in 2020, it's taken the band 18 months to finally get it out there beyond the confines of their website thanks to Covid. As you'd expect from the band name, this is definitely a group with a strong AC/DC influence with the headbanging riffs and leering vocals definitely conjuring up the spirit of Bon Scott nicely. Likewise, the snaky riff of Screaming Bloody Murder  is reminiscent of early Broken Teeth and Palm Of My Hand  definitely owes a sly nod to the old L.A. Guns classic Rip 'n' Tear . On the surface, it may seem that Angus Khan are a fairly straightforward group musically but they're capable of throwing the odd surprise your way such as the New Orleans style horns and piano underpinning the sinister boogie of Graveyard Dance . It isn't quite all ki...

  The onset of the pandemic a couple of years ago hit a lot of bands hard but Ryan Hamilton probably took more of a battering off it than most. With his star firmly in the ascendant in the UK and four critically acclaimed albums to his name with his band the Harlequin Ghosts, he suddenly found himself trapped an ocean apart from his bandmates and forced to go back to square one. Ever the resourceful musician, he decided to record a track a month during the year just gone for the 1221  singles club (not the first time Hamilton has tried this - he also did the Traitors Club a couple of years ago) with all the tracks eventually being compiled on the album which is now available to buy. As you'd expect from something that was essentially thrown together on the fly, the main drawback here is that 1221  is a bit of a disjointed effort and my overbearing feeling throughout is that Ryan might have been better off releasing this as a trio of four-song EP's where it arguably would ...

Oxford power-poppers Los Pepes are one of those bands who seem to have been getting better with every release since their inception a decade or so ago and having now mastered the art of capturing the tightwire ferocity of their live shows on record as well, have been on a good run of late. And on the evidence of The Happiness Program , they're continuing to move forward with an impressive self-assuredness. Weirdly, the band that this album reminds me of the most is early Dr Feelgood with the tightwire guitar lines and honking harmonica on the opening trio of Small Time , Never Get It Right  and I Want You Back  being exactly the sort of thing you could hear Lee Brilleaux growling along to. However, there's an impressive snotty punk angst underpinning the likes of the title track  Let Them Talk  (which could almost be the Replacements in one of their angrier moments) while Sick And Bored  sounds like a lost Buzzcocks power-pop number with added Lora Logic style s...

  Hailing from Spain and signed to Rum Bar Records, it's perhaps not a surprise that there's a very noticeable Ramones influence hanging over this new offering from the Pulsebeats (heck, there's even a song here called She Sings Like Joey Ramone !). And let's be honest, these kind of things can go one of two ways. As this field seems to get more and more crowded by the year, there's been more than a few bands offering decidedly lazy rip-offs of the Ramones sound while others have the nous to put a twist on the formula to avoid sounding too derivative. And I'm pleased to report that Lookin' Out  is definitely one of the latter type of records - yes, you'd have to be pretty cloth-eared not to spot the Ramones influence but at least these guys are smart enough to do something a bit different with it. If anything, these guys owe just as much to the Buzzcocks' lightning fast power-pop or the Flamin' Groovies more melodic late '70s phase as they do...

  "Rockin' is my business and business is good (and if it's so good why am I still fuckin' broke?)"  - The Four Horsemen - Rockin' Is My Business There are a lot of great forgotten bands from the Sunset Strip era who offered a much harder leaner and meaner take on the sleaze rock formula than the chart-friendly fluff of yer Poisons and Warrants yet still got undeservedly swept away by grunge but the Four Horsemen really were one of the most desperately unlucky out there. Their harder-edged but supremely tuneful take on the formula, similar to other bands like Junkyard or Circus of Power (or if you're looking for a British equivalent, the Almighty 's first two albums), should have seen them up there among the big-hitters but a combination of bad luck, bad timing and about a million other things pretty much sunk them without a trace. The group were formed by guitarist Stephen "Haggis" Harris in 1989. Haggis had started his career a few years ea...

  75 years ago today, one of the great musical geniuses of our age was born. Six years ago on Monday, he left us. So it seemed only right that we should celebrate the anniversary of Bowie's birth and death by doing an album by album guide to his decidedly vast body of work. The main thing to bear in mind when looking back through David Bowie's back catalogue is that he was pretty much a musical chameleon without compare and would rarely stick with the same style of music for more than a couple of albums. Although this did lead to him making the odd creative mis-step down the years it also means that listening to his stuff is never dull and often fascinating as you chart his evolution. Here you go then, from the diamonds to the odd dog, a look back at all 26 Bowie albums. Happy 75th Ziggy, we miss ya. 26. Never Let Me Down (1987) Unfortunately logic dictates that when you have a career the length and musical breadth of Bowie’s that you will make the occasional mis-step and Nev...